Dutchman with Intermission

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Photo Credit: Maria Pretzl and Nathaniel Schardin

Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman is a fiercely clever one-hour drama from 1964. The World’s Stage Theatre brings a staging of the play to the Arcade Theatre in the Underground Collaborative this month. It remains provocative 50 years after its debut. The story of a white woman seducing a black man on public transportation may have a different weight and impact than it did in the mid-1960s, but it’s still a very intense look into race relations in the US.

The staging is simple. Flickering lights overhead suggest a subway car. Seats are laid-out in the intimate studio theatre in a way that suggests a subway car. the car itself is taped-off so as to allay anyone’s fears that they may be sitting onstage. In full period costume, Marissa Clayton bounces around drunkenly to pop hits of the decade playing through the sound system as people filter-in. There’s a man announcing the next departure--the beginning of the play. It’s just enough mood to establish time and place.

Marques Causey plays Clay--a middle-class black guy. He sits down in an empty car to read a paper. In walks Sasha Katharine Sigel as Lula. Lula is a spacey, quirky, vicious liar who has come to seduce Clay and possibly more. At first it’s just a strange interaction between strangers. Over time politics and prejudice seep into the  conversation. Then things get ugly.

As Clay, Causey is timid for much of the drama that unfolds. The real problem here could be the contrast between the sheepishness and the angrier energy we see out of the character near the end of the play. Causey filters enough non-timid elements into his performance early on to keep the transformation from seeming like too much of a disconnect between Clay at the beginning and the end of the play. It’s a really delicate performance. It’s one thing for Causey to layer in little bits of assertiveness throughout the early portions of the play, but the fact that they’re distinct enough to make the character feel fluid and continuous from the beginning to the end of the play is quite an accomplishment. Causey has kind of a nice guy presence about him onstage. Here he does a really good job of working with that presence to render something with a great deal of depth.

Sasha Katharine Sigel is poetically seductive as Lula. The kind of quirky intellectualism that Baraka wrote into the character has become kind of mainstream in the 50 years since it was originally staged. Sigel finds just the right line on Lula’s hipster attitude to make it feel genuine and unique in spite of this. It’s fascinating to watch her dive through it. The character can easily be read as one, long psychotic break from reality with seething, little flecks of pure spite. Thankfully, Sigel firmly grounds the character in a kind of an earthbound reality that makes her seem more like a person and less like a force of nature. This is important, because the play is very allegorical. And there’s nothing that alienates a real-world discussion of race relations or any serious political issue quite like allegory. In Sigel we see a very strong individual woman first and foremost and that keeps everything quite firmly grounded.

Be forewarned that there is an intermission. Dutchman is a one-act play. At roughly one hour long, it doesn’t need an intermission. More than that, the intermission breaks-up the flow and rhythm of the piece way too much. I had not been aware of the intermission going in to see the show and got a little inwardly angry about the  whole thing while sitting through the intermission. I guess I got a little overly dramatic and felt like the entire play had been ruined by the decision to include an intermission, but I cooled off as the second half of the play heated-up.

The World’s Stage’s production of Dutchman is NOT ruined by an intermission, but it IS severely compromised by it. There’s an extended fugue about the drama that really needs to settle-in over the course of its hour without interruption. Throwing an intermission into this thing interrupts the flow way too much. For the sake of making a point, ignore the politics of the piece and it’s a really long, really weird and poetic conversation between a couple of strangers that ends badly. Interrupt the flow of that one-hour conversation between strangers and it compromises the dreamlike nightmare of the flow of the conversation.

More than just messing with the mood, the intermission also compromises the gradual flow of what I see as being the two major themes of the drama: the subjective nature of reality and the insidiously subtle nature of racism. Throughout the drama, Lula’s interaction Clay playfully dances across a full spectrum of different racist notions and postures. So much of it is so subtle that you don’t even notice that it’s there, but Baraka deftly fuses it all together in one, long fluid conversation. Breaking it up with an intermission interrupts the fluidity of that conversation.

The subjective nature of reality feeds its way through the conversation as Lula tells Clay that she never tells the truth. Of course, this statement in and of itself is paradoxical. We don’t know whether or not Lula is being honest about anything over the course of the entire conversation. In the ebb and flow of things, it becomes rather difficult to tell just how honest Clay is being on certain points as well. The interplay between truth fiction, apprehension and exaggeration throughout the dialogue plays this brilliant, little dance throughout the hour. Breaking it up with an intermission interrupts the rhythm of that dance between truth and fiction. That being said, Dutchman is so rarely-produced that it’s well worth seeing this show even though the rhythm of it is interrupted by intermission.

The World’s Stage Theatre Company’s production of Dutchman runs through Dec. 20 at the Arcade Theatre in the Underground Collaborative on 161 W. Wisconsin Ave. For ticket reservations, click here